Monday, December 24, 2012

Best Floor Tile on the Market

Now I must learn far too much about things which go in homes. Today was tile. Being an engineer who would like to make things practically indestructible I decided to focus on a few aspects of tile:

First is its PEI rating. There does not seem to be much additional cost associated with using PEI 5 rated tile. This tile is good enough to put into a mall, so it should certainly be good enough to go in my bathroom. It does limit me to mostly porcelain tile though.

Second is that I want thru body porcelain. This is tile which is the same color in the center as on the top. This means that if it chips the bottom of the chip will be the same color as the tile around it. This used to be standard in porcelain tile, but slowly has gone out of style because it limits options.

Last is coefficient of friction. The higher the coefficient of friction, the less slippery the tile is. Anything less than 0.8 cannot be used in Los Angeles for sloped tile, so I should be able to find many options which exceed this value.

Unfortunately, normal people do not shop like me. Most sites made it very difficult to find all three pieces of information about each tile. I was able to find four tiles which stood out though. They had a minimum dry coefficient of friction of 0.87 while meeting the other two criteria. The first two actually look decent so I will likely go with one of those.

Tile #1
Tile #2
Tile #3
Tile #4

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